Quality Indicators on Global Software Development Projects: Does "Getting to Know You" Really Matter?

In Spring 2008, five student teams were put into competition to develop software for a Cambodian client. Each extended team comprised students distributed across a minimum of three locations, drawn from the US, India, Thailand and Cambodia. This paper describes a couple of exercises conducted with students to examine their basic awareness of the countries of their collaborators and competitors, and to assess their knowledge of their own extended team members during the course of the project. The results from these exercises are examined in conjunction with the high-level communication patterns exhibited by the participating teams and provisional findings are drawn with respect to quality, as measured through a final product selection process. Initial implications for practice are discussed.